During my 10 minute :-) presentation on thursday, Clay and Sarah both brought up an issue with one of the design points for Virtual Machine Constructor. Specifically the plan to allow a user to construct a bootable AI media during Virtual Machine Construction. Their argument to not doing this is maintainability, supportability and easing the test matrix. They proposed not allowing the creation of bootable AI media during Virtual Machine Construction and only allowing the user to specify a path to a pre-constructed bootable AI piece of media.
I like this approach. This clearly seperates the payload construction (bootable AI media) from what is required to construct a Virtual Machine. Users will need to construct a bootable AI media (or use the default bootable AI media image) before they can run the Virtual Machine Constructor. The VMC will take this media and de-construct it so that it can be used to install the VM the user wants to create. Additionally, if the user specifies an AI client manifest in the VMC DC manifest then we'll replace the default AI client manifest on the bootable AI media (also specified by the user) during the de-construction phase[1] of the bootable AI media. Does anyone have any thoughts on this in addition to what was brought up on thursday? Does anyone think it's a bad idea? Thanks, -- Glenn 1 - The de-construction phase refers to the work the VMC project will need to do in order to change the grub menu on the bootable AI media to boot the AI client in a way that it reads it's client manifest from the media automatically instead of the default option which asks the user to specify where the AI client manifest is located during boot.
